An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a system that provides communications, message routing, and message transformation to enterprise applications. For example, an application (requestor) may request data from another application (provider) in the enterprise. The ESB receives the message from the requester, transforms the message to a protocol and format understood by the provider application, and then forwards the transformed message to the provider application for processing. In response, the provider application performs desired operations and can send a message or resultant data to the requesting application. In this manner, the ESB provides communications between otherwise incompatible applications.